One feels the burden of responsibility at times at Belmont Filmhouse. To listen to our customers and our members. To deliver quality cinema. To find creative ways to be accessible and socially responsible. As the Climate Emergency begins to reshape our world we also feel the responsibility to be an environmentally conscious business. We have to ask ourselves, ‘how we can make a contribution’? 

We have a unique opportunity to communicate change by challenging narratives with the films we show. We too have to be socially responsible in the message we broadcast, as well as the actions we take. It’s why we bring film festivals like Take One Action to our audience. They find the best documentaries on social, economic and climate justice and we show them. It’s why we find films like The Biggest Little Farm, a documentary on sustainable farming in California and bring them to Aberdeen. And it’s also why we have as much diversity as we can within our film programme. These issues require international voices. 

This stellar brochure takes us through until 2020. Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren star in The Good Liar; Scorsese’s best work in years with The Irishman and Noah Baumbach hitting critical peak with Marriage Story. There’s also massive ensemble casts in The Report and The King. Ordinary Love on the other hand is a more intimate portrait of a marriage scarred by a cancer diagnosis, with superb turns from Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville. Werner Herzog interviews Gorbachev in Meeting Gorbachev in the only way he can (‘What would be written on your tombstone?’) and Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins dust off the chops to play Popes Francis and Benedict respectively in The Two Popes. 

Still from The Irishman
Robert De Niro starring in The Irishman 

The French Film Festival UK continues after kicking off at the very tail end of the last brochure and Fokus: Films From Germany starts. Also a short Whodunnit? season accompanies Rian Johnson’s fantastic murder mystery Knives Out – Daniel Craig, Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, Christoper Plummer and one Don Johnson jostle for position in one of the finest casts of the year. 

And after Christmas At Our House including It’s A Wonderful Life and a secret members’ Xmas screening, we’ll see you through to the New Year with Little Women, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Tom Hooper’s Cats, which nearly broke the internet with its mindboggling trailer. It couldn’t be more…purrfect? 

Still from It's A Wonderful Life
Christmas classic, It's A Wonderful Life

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year when it comes.